In addition to interdental cleaners consisting of wood or metal wire from earlier times, interdental cleaners consisting of plastic are nowadays known, as they are shown and described in EP 0 932 371. Such an interdental cleaner has a rod-shaped carrier consisting of a relatively hard and dimensionally stable plastic, which is provided in the front area of its axial length with a sleeve-like cover consisting of a soft plastic, for example, a thermoplastic elastomer. On its radially outer side, the cover may have a structuring in the form of nubs and/or radially outwardly extending fingers in order to enhance the cleaning effect.
The user can grasp the interdental cleaner on a grip section of the rod-shaped carrier and insert the rod-shaped carrier with the cover carrying the structuring into an interdental space and move it there to and fro, as a result of which the interdental space is cleaned and particles that may possibly adhere there are detached.
Based on the radially projecting fingers forming the structuring, the cleaning effect of the interdental cleaner is determined essentially by the fingers, which come into contact with the interdental spaces to be cleaned over a relatively small surface, so that a plurality of small-surface, local cleaning zones are obtained, but no large-surface cleaning is achieved. To achieve large-surface cleaning, attempts are made in an interdental cleaner according to U.S. Pat. No. 5,044,041 to apply a flat, net-like fabric part on a rod-shaped carrier by thermal bonding. The fabric part is formed from two thread systems intersecting one another at right angles, so-called warp threads and weft threads, which thread system is inserted into an injection mold and on which the rod-shaped carrier is formed by injection molding. It was found in practice that when the interdental cleaner is used, there is a risk that individual threads become detached from the fabric part in the user's mouth, which is very unpleasant for the user and thus there is a risk that the user will swallow the detached threads.